McCormick Distilling drinks to the future

Written and produced by James Buchanan & Michael Magno.


Size does matter, but it can cut both ways.

Large companies portray their relative size as an advantage when it comes to marketing and achieving certain operational efficiencies. You know - economies of scale, and all that.

However, on the other side of the scale, smaller companies can claim an advantage when it comes to flexibility and being able to quickly move new products to market.
For McCormick Distilling Co., Inc., based in Weston, Mo., the latter of these two scenarios has helped them achieve considerable growth in a relatively short amount of time.

"In 1993, when the current owners purchased the company, our payroll was less than $1 million and that has grown to more than $6 million," says Jim Zargo, president of McCormick Distilling. "In that same amount of time we were producing around 1.5 million cases and now we are producing almost four million - so our volume has almost tripled as well as our sales volume."

Zargo adds that the company's growth is due in part to unleashing the self-imposed constraints of the company's former owner.

"Since Midwest Grain was primarily selling bulk alcohol with just a very little bit of bottled goods, there were certain markets that they just didn't want to go into; certain regional markets," he says. "When we bought the company we just started expanding our distribution, and probably the biggest success we had - the one that got us off the ground - was the introduction of our premium brand Tequila Rose